Rachel Barenblat
| Name: | Rachel Barenblat | |
| Also Known As: | rbarenblat, RB | |
| Occupation: | OTW board member, rabbi | |
| Medium: | articles | |
| Works: | listed | |
| Official Website(s): | Velveteen Rabbi, rbarenblat on dreamwidth | |
| Fan Website(s): | ||
| On Fanlore: | Related pages | |
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Overview
Rachel Barenblat is a longtime fan, and also a writer, blogger, and rabbi. She is co-founder of Inkberry, a literary arts nonprofit organization whose mission is to help every writer find his or her own voice. [1] She joined the the OTW board in 2009 and served one three-year term.
She sees fanworks (especially fanfiction) as fundamentally similar to the Jewish practice of midrash (writing stories to explore and explain Torah texts). She is author of Seventy Faces, a collection of Torah poems (poems arising out of / in conversation with the weekly Torah portion: basically Biblical fanfic in poem form), Phoenicia Publishing, 2011.
As OTW Board Member
Over the years she has lent a hand to DevMem and Communications; in 2010 she joined the Wiki Committee. In 2011 she co-chaired that committee with æþel.
In October 2011 she posted Some thoughts on (almost) finishing a three-year Board term at the OTW:
- Being on the board of the OTW requires a leap of faith. One has to have faith first and foremost in the org's mission; in the org's projects; in the fans who are building, and who continue to work on building, the org's tools. And one has to have faith in the fans who will come next, who will continue the work which has already begun. Every now and then I take a step back and look at what's involved in making this org happen and keeping it alive, and I am more than a little bit awestruck by who we are and what we can do when we pull together as the volunteers and staffers of the OTW have done and continue to do.[2]
Her Board term ended at the end of 2011.
Bibliography of Fandom-Related Work
- On Transformative Works, Velveteen Rabbi blog, November 2008.
- Transformative Work: Midrash and Fanfiction, Religion & Literature issue 43.2, summer 2011. (The whole essay is only available online via JSTOR, though the first several paragraphs are available in a post at Velveteen Rabbi.)
References
- ↑ Who We Are, accessed October 1, 2010.
- ↑ Some thoughts on (almost) finishing a three-year Board term at the OTW, accessed November 11, 2011
